Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

I clutched the handle as the rickshaw crested a hillocky part of the dirt road.

“But what can you say, he only had that one daughter, and she’s dead, poor girl. Even if she were alive, what good would it have done? Could she have lit his pyre? What’s a man to do without a son? I’m telling you, Babu, I’m a poor man, not a landowner like Pagla Dadu, but God above has blessed me with two strapping sons. To throw me a handful of rice when I can’t pull this rickshaw any more. To touch a flaming torch to my pyre.”

We were approaching the same drive, now looking even more unkempt. The rickshaw set me down before the same deep front verandah that Aangti Babu and I had sat in. The same cane chairs stood in the verandah, and I could have sworn the brown discoloration on the verandah wall was the spot Aangti Babu’s betel juice had splattered on. The rickshawallah took his money and cycled away.

Only one thing was different: one of the cane chairs was occupied by Harold.

* * *

He was dressed as usual: shiny old suit, narrow blue tie with bright yellow stripes, the trousers two inches too short for him, showing worn, black socks over thin ankles, despite which he looked respectable enough, more like an elderly schoolmaster than a thug. He looked up with a beaming smile when he saw me and exclaimed, “Oh, Mukunda, m’ boy, I’m bloody glad to see you! Didn’t know the boss was sending reinforcements.”

He dropped his voice and said, “I tell you, m’n, this job’s got me foxed. The boss said to go an’ hunt for the deed — the old bugger who’s kicked the bucket stuffed it in some hole somewhere in this whackin’ big bledgy mansion of his. An’ I’ve got to pose as a buyer and just look around like, and then find it! An’ y’know what, m’n? For a change the boss sez don’t get rough, you got a girl here to work on, just find the dashed deed, he’s already paid some bugger an advance for the house and he just needs the papers quick and quiet — but tell me how? Give me a straight job and I’ll do it m’n, it’s easy to beat the stuffing out of a man and make him cough up a bloomin’ deed, but dealin’ with dames? I wasn’t brought up to bully the gentle sex, no, m’boy.”

At this point Bakul came into the front verandah. I don’t know if she had overheard Harold, but she gave no sign of recognising me. She gave me a quick, somewhat cold look and said to Harold, “If you and your colleague are ready …?” She turned and walked back in without waiting for us to follow. Harold made a face behind her back, mimicking her frown, and motioned me to follow.

“The ground floor is a mess, I’m sorry to say,” Bakul had begun, her voice echoing in the almost-empty room. “You see the river has been flooding it every year and there have been hardly any repairs, no upkeep. My grandfather lived upstairs till he died.” She spoke with a measured politeness, a calm impersonality that confused me. Did she actually imagine I too had come to dupe her? Or was this part of some elaborate plan?

We went from room to room, Bakul providing explanations for each, with apologies for the all-pervading dust. She spoke in the same passionless, descriptive way, not pausing to let us respond. I recognised the mildewed portraits on the ground floor from my visit with Aangti Babu, and the chandelier he had been eyeing still hung from the ceiling, too grey with dust and cobwebs, surely, to make light. We passed through an enormous wood-panelled billiards room, the table piled high with legless chairs, broken boxes, and pictures in frames. I wondered who had used it in the past — it was certainly never going to be usable in the future.

Harold was darting about like a long-legged insect, peering here and there. When he noticed Bakul’s ironic gaze levelled at him, he said hurriedly, “Termites, ma’am, one can’t be too careful, don’t want to take on property with woodworm. If you’ll excuse me … ” He rapped a knuckle on the wood of a cupboard as if to make sure it hadn’t rotted.

We went up a creaking staircase to the first floor. Upstairs, where I had never been, there was Victorian furniture, and everything was as if the occupants of the house had just gone out for a walk. There was a typewriter on a grimy rolltop desk, with a sheet of paper flapping in it. An empty cup and saucer, brown with dust, stood on a side table. I passed a huge framed mirror so opaque with dust that all I could see of myself in it was a shadowy form — it was like looking through the eyes of a half-blind man. We stepped through clouds of grime and cobwebs, passing ghostly chairs and tables, four-poster beds and sideboards, pictures on the wall that showed nothing but black fungus and dirt, and spiders’ legs drifting streamers for a ghoulish party.

In one of the rooms there was a carved, glass-fronted cupboard in a corner, and Harold bent almost double to look into it. He gestured to me. “Bledgy hell, look at that, m’n, wouldn’t the boss like that?” Inside the cupboard were five glass shelves, each containing delicate figurines of men, women and gods, children and animals, dozens of them, all in ivory. Even the wood of the cupboard was inlaid with ivory. Some of the figures stood upright, some had fallen on their faces in the dust that coated the shelves.

“Exquisite, aren’t they?” Bakul’s voice startled me. “And priceless. It shows the five days of Durga puja and all the different things that happen each day. Only, the key to the cupboard is lost, so when the figures fall, they remain forever fallen.

“As you can see,” she continued, moving into the next room, “the upstairs is in better condition, structurally. I had planned to get everything cleaned before you came so things would look better … but never mind, you’re earlier than I expected. The damage downstairs isn’t as terrible as it could have been, considering the house had two feet of water in it every monsoon. Prospective customers are likely to know this from the locals — they call it the drowned house, so there’s no point trying to hide the fact. Of course,” she turned to me and Harold with a raised eyebrow, “your customers — or you — may not want to keep the house at all.” She shrugged. “You may want to demolish it. If that’s so, you’re in trouble. This is a sturdy place. It won’t go down without a fight.”

By now we had rounded the corner of the wide verandah that ran the length of the house. Beyond it we could see hardly anything but trees, and only bakul trees. Soon they would be in flower and the air heavy with their scent. This part of the verandah appeared to have been swept and cleaned. It looked as if someone lived there.

“This is one of the upper bedrooms,” Bakul said in a smaller voice than before. “There are four more.”

The room was clean and smelled fresh, as if still in use. There was a single, green-sheeted bed with a simple headboard, an ordinary wooden cupboard, and a dressing table with a long mirror. The window opened onto a tree whose branches almost came into the room. Another bakul tree. On the wall was a picture of Bakul’s mother, Shanti. There was a thin, dried-up garland around the picture and the ashes of incense on the table before it. She looked exactly as Bakul had when we made love in Songarh that afternoon — her refusal to recognise me now made it all seem too far away to be true any longer.

For a moment Bakul and I stood in the room, not speaking, forgetting Harold. I remembered how she had longed for her mother all through her childhood, how she had tried to hide it. I felt wretched, but could do nothing. I could not hold her and tell her, “It’s me, you can say what you like.”

The moment passed. Bakul’s voice returned, “I’m afraid the other bedrooms aren’t quite so clean, but of course you must see them. The one that used to be my grandfather’s has some spectacular carved cupboards and a very striking four-poster bed.” Then she said, “What happens to the furniture? Is that part of the deal?”